by Ian Mcewan
And there was more than the Eaton Square house. Darke had already owned and sold a record company. By the time he left Cambridge it had been clear to all but the commercially astute that popular music was the exclusive preserve of the young. The astute remembered middle England, the parents who had lived through the Depression and had fought in a world war. With these nightmares behind them they needed sweetness, warmth and an occasional wistfulness in their music. Darke specialised in ‘easy’ listening, favourite classics, evergreen melodies orchestrated for two hundred strings.
He was also unfashionably successful in his choice of a wife twelve years his senior. Thelma was a lecturer in physics at Birkbeck with a respected thesis recently completed on – as far as any gossip columnist could tell – the nature of time. She was not the obvious wife for a young millionaire in the kitsch music business, a man young enough, some said cruelly, to be her son. Thelma talked her husband into starting a literary book club and the success of this brought him to the dusty firm of Gott’s which, within two years, was in profit for the first time in a quarter of a century. It was in his fourth year there that Darke took Stephen to lunch, but a further five were to pass, by which time Darke was the head of an independent television company and Stephen was something of a limited success himself, before the two men were close friends and Stephen – his claim on youth relinquished – became a regular visitor at Eaton Square.
The arrival of fresh plates, the perfunctory sampling of a different wine, did not interrupt for one moment Darke’s urgent, kindly, self-loving speech. He spoke rapidly, with a kind of hunted assurance, as though he were addressing a meeting of sceptical shareholders, as though he feared the silence that would return him to his own thoughts. It was a long time before Stephen understood from what depth of feeling he was speaking. At the time it felt like a hard sell in which the publisher made good and instinctive use of his author’s Christian name.
‘Stephen, listen. Stephen, talk to a ten-year-old in midsummer about Christmas. You could be talking to an adolescent about his retirement plans, his pension. For children, childhood is timeless. It’s always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say “When I grow up …” there’s always an edge of disbelief – how could they ever be other than what they are? Now you say Lemonade wasn’t written for children, and I believe you, Stephen. Like all good writers, you wrote it for yourself. And this is my point. It was your ten-year-old self you addressed. This book is not for children, it’s for a child, and that child is you. Lemonade is a message from you to a previous self which will never cease to exist. And the message is bitter. That is what makes it such a disturbing book to read. When Mandy Rien’s daughter read it she wept, bitter tears, but useful tears too, Stephen. Other kids have reacted in the same way. You’ve spoken directly to children. Whether you wanted to or not, you’ve communicated with them across the abyss that separates the child from the adult and you’ve given them a first, ghostly intimation of their mortality. Reading you, they get wind of the idea that they are finite as children. Instead of just being told, they really understand that it won’t last, it can’t last, that sooner or later they’re finished, done for, that their childhood is not for ever. You put over to them something shocking and sad about grown-ups, about those who have ceased to be children. Something dried up, powerless, a boredom, a taking for granted. They understand from you that it’s all heading towards them, as certain as Christmas. It’s a sad message, but it’s a true one. This is a book for children through the eyes of an adult.’
Charles Darke took a hearty pull of the wine he had tested with such absent-minded discernment a couple of minutes before. He cocked his head, savouring the implications of his own words. Then, raising his glass, he emptied it and repeated, ‘A sad message, but very, very true.’ Stephen looked up sharply at what sounded like a catch in his publisher’s voice.
Apart from the two weeks which were the subject of his novel, Stephen’s childhood had been pleasantly dull, despite its exotic locations. If he were to send back a message now it would be one of dour encouragement: things will improve – very slowly. But was there a message for adults too?
Darke’s mouth was crammed with sweetbreads. He waved his fork in the air in tight little circles, desperate to speak; he succeeded finally through a garlic-scented gasp which temporarily altered the flavour of Stephen’s salmon. ‘Of course. But it won’t change lives. It’ll sell three thousand copies and you’ll get some decent reviews. But package it for kids …’ Darke flopped back in his seat and raised his glass.
Stephen shook his head and spoke softly. ‘I won’t permit it. I’ll never permit it.’
Turner Malbert did the illustrations in tasteful, limpid watercolours. In the week of publication, a famous child psychologist appeared on television to make an impassioned attack on the book. It was more than any child should be expected to deal with, it would unhinge latently unstable minds. Other experts defended it, a handful of librarians boosted its currency by refusing to stock it. For a month or two it was a topic at dinner parties. Lemonade sold a quarter of a million copies in hardback, and eventually several million around the world. Stephen gave up his job, bought a fast car and a cavernous, high-ceilinged flat in South London, and generated a tax bill that two years later made it a virtual necessity to publish his second novel as a children’s book too.
In retrospect, the events of Stephen’s year, the committee year, were to seem organised round a single outcome. Living through that year, however, he felt it to be empty time, dry of meaning or purpose. His usual diffidence was spectacularly heightened. For example, the second day of the Olympic Games brought a sudden threat of global extinction; for twelve hours things went quite out of control, and Stephen, sprawling on the sofa in his underwear for the heat, did not much care either way.
Two sprinters, a Russian and an American, quivering, whippet-like men, rubbed shoulders at the starting blocks and became irritable. The American struck out with a clenched fist, the other lashed back and seriously scratched the first man’s eye. Violence, and the idea of violence, spread outwards, then upwards through intricate systems of command. First team-mates, then coaches tried to intervene, lost their tempers and became involved in the fighting. The few Russian and American spectators in the stands sought one another out. There was an ugly scene with a broken bottle, and within minutes a young American – unfortunately an off-duty soldier – had bled to death. On the track two high officials representing the opposing powers were pulling at one another’s blazers and a lapel was badly torn. A starting pistol was fired in a Russian woman’s face and a second eye was lost, an eye for an eye. There was shoving and snarling in the press box.
Within half an hour both teams had withdrawn from the games and at rival press conferences were exchanging insults of scatological intensity. Very soon the murderer of the soldier was apprehended and allegations were made that he had KGB connections and military motives. Between the respective embassies there was an exchange of fiercely worded notes. The American President, newly installed and with something of a sprinter’s constitution himself, was anxious to demonstrate that he was not the weakling in foreign policy that his opponents frequently claimed, and was casting about for something to do. He was still pondering when the Russians astonished the world by closing the border crossing at Helmstedt.
In the United States this act was blamed on the prevarications of a docile President, who now silenced his critics by bringing his country’s nuclear forces to their most advanced state of readiness. The Russians did likewise. Nuclear submarines slid quietly to their allotted firing points, silos gaped open, missiles bristled in the hot shrubbery of rural Oxfordshire and in the birch forests of the Carpathians. Newspaper columns and television screens filled with professors of deterrence who urged the importance of getting the missil
es in the air before they were destroyed on the ground. In a matter of hours the supermarkets of Great Britain were emptied of sugar, tea, baked beans and soft toilet rolls. The confrontation lasted half a day until the non-aligned nations initiated a supervised, simultaneous scaling-down of nuclear readiness. Life on earth was to continue after all and so, with much fanfaring of the Olympic spirit, the hundred metres heat was resumed and there was planetary relief when it was won by a neutral Swede.
It may have been the freakishly good summer, or the Scotch he drank from late morning on, which made him feel better than he knew he really was, but Stephen honestly did not mind that life on earth was to continue. It was much like a cup final played between two foreign teams. The drama held him while it unfolded, but he had no stake in the result, for him it could go either way. The universe was enormous, he thought wearily, intelligent life was spread thinly, but the planets involved were probably innumerable. Among those who stumbled across the convertibility of matter and energy there were bound to be quite a few who blew themselves to bits, and they were likely to be the ones who did not deserve to survive. The dilemma wasn’t human, he thought lazily, scratching himself through his underpants, it was in the very structure of matter itself, and there was nothing much to be done about that.
Similarly, other more personal events, some of which were rather odd or intense, fascinated him while they were happening, but at one remove, as though someone else, not him, was involved, and afterwards he gave them little thought and certainly made no connections between them. They were background to the real business of steady, supine drinking, of avoiding friends and work, of failing to concentrate whenever he was drawn into conversation, of being unable to read more than twenty lines of print before wandering again, fantasising, remembering.
And when Darke resigned – the official announcement came two days after the Parmenter committee launch – Stephen went round to Eaton Square because Thelma phoned and asked him. He became involved not because he was an old friend and naturally concerned, nor because he owed Charles and Thelma favours. He made, or seemed to make, no decision in the matter at all; his friends needed a witness, someone they could explain themselves to, who could stand in for the outside world. Although he was chosen, he was later to question the extent of his own passivity; the Darkes had many friends after all, but perhaps Stephen was the only suitable observer of what Charles was to enact.
Two hours after Thelma phoned, Stephen set out to walk to Eaton Square from Stockwell by way of Chelsea Bridge. The warm, early evening air was smooth in the throat, and the pavements outside pubs were thick with beer drinkers, dark-skinned and talkative, apparently carefree. The national character had been transformed by a prolonged heatwave. Halfway across the bridge he stopped to read the evening newspaper. The resignation had made the front page, but not the headlines. A boxed inset at the foot of the page spoke of ill-health and, self-consciously scandalous, hinted at some kind of breakdown. The Prime Minister was said to be ‘vaguely annoyed’ at not having been warned. The diary page ran a short paragraph which said that Darke was too unpolitical, too relaxed in his attitude ever to have expected high office. The Prime Minister distrusted his past connection with books. Only close friends, the piece concluded, would be much moved by his departure. Aware of two beggars bearing down on him, men in long coats despite the warmth, Stephen folded his paper and continued across the bridge.
There had been an evening in a Greek restaurant many years before when Darke had initiated a parlour game. He was contemplating moving out of television management, at which he had been a qualified success, and into politics. But which party should he join? Elated, Darke sat next to Julie pouring wine, making a show of being firm with the waiter, doing everyone’s ordering. The conversation was joky and mock-cynical, but embodied some truth. Darke had no political convictions, only managerial skill and great ambition. He could join any party. A friend of Julie’s from New York was taking the matter seriously and insisting that the choice lay between the emphasis on the collectivity of experience or its uniqueness. Darke spread his hands and said that he could argue for both. For the support of the weak, for the advancement of the strong. The more fundamental question was – and here he paused while someone else completed his sentence – Who do you know who can get you selected as a candidate? Darke laughed louder than anyone.
By the time the Turkish coffees came it was decided that he should make his career on the right. The arguments were straightforward. It was in power and likely to remain so. From his business days Darke knew a good number of people with connections in the Party machine. On the left the selection procedures were tortuously democratic and unreasonably weighted against those who had never been members of the Party. ‘It’s all very simple, Charles,’ Julie said as they were leaving the restaurant. ‘All you have to fear is the lifelong contempt of all your friends.’ Again, Darke laughed boisterously.
There were initial difficulties, but it was not too long before he was offered a candidacy in rural Suffolk where he managed to halve his predecessor’s majority with some thoughtless remarks about pigs. He and Thelma sold their weekend cottage in Gloucestershire and bought a weekend cottage on the edge of the constituency. Politics brought out something in Darke which the record industry, publishing or television management had barely touched. Within weeks he was on television himself, ostensibly to comment on some irregularity in his constituency – a pensioner whose electricity supply had been cut was dead from hypothermia. Breaking the unspoken rule, Darke talked to camera rather than to interviewer, and managed to insert quick summaries of recent Government successes. He was a barrage-of-words man. He was in a studio two weeks later ably refuting some self-evident truth. The friends who had helped him were impressed. He was noticed at Party Headquarters. At a time when the Government was in difficulties with its own back benches, Darke was a ferocious defender. He sounded reasonable and concerned while advocating self-reliance for the poor and incentives for the rich. After long consideration and more parlour games at the supper table, he decided to speak against the hangers in the annual punishment debate at Conference. The idea was to be tough but caring, tough and caring. He spoke well to that theme on a law and order radio panel discussion – earning three solemn bursts of applause from the studio audience – and was quoted in a Times leader.
For the next three years he attended dinners and made himself knowledgeable in fields where he thought there might be jobs going – education, transport, agriculture. He kept himself busy. He made a parachute jump for charity and cracked his shin. Television cameras were there. He was on a panel of judges for a famous literary prize and made indiscreet remarks about the chairman. He was chosen to present his private member’s bill to outlaw kerb-crawling. It was lost for lack of time, but it made him popular with the tabloids. And all the time he kept talking, jabbing his forefinger in the air, uttering opinions he never thought he had, developing the oracular high style of the spokesman – ‘I think I speak for all of us when I say …’ and ‘Let no one deny …’ and ‘The Government has made its position clear …’
He wrote a piece for The Times reviewing the first two years of licensed begging which he read aloud to Stephen in the magnificent drawing room at Eaton Square. ‘By removing the dross of pre-legislation days, and aiming for a leaner, fitter public charity sector, the government has provided itself in microcosm with an ideal towards which its economic policies should aspire. Tens of millions have been saved in social security payments, and a large number of men, women and children have been introduced to the pitfalls and strenuous satisfactions of self-sufficiency long familiar to the business community in this country.’
Stephen never doubted that sooner or later his friend would tire of politics and begin another adventure. He kept up a show of wry distance, mocking Charles for his opportunism.
‘If you had decided to go with the other side,’ Stephen had said to him, ‘you’d be arguing just as passionately now for taking the C
ity into public ownership, lower defence spending, and the abolition of private education.’
Darke smacked his own forehead, feigning astonishment at his friend’s naivety. ‘You idiot! I stood for this programme. A majority elected me because of it. It doesn’t matter what I think. I have my mandate – a freer City, more weapons, good private schools.’
‘You’re not in it for yourself then.’
‘Of course not. I serve!’ And the two men laughed into their drinks.
In fact Stephen’s own cynicism concealed a fascination with the unfolding story of Charles’s career. Stephen did not know any other MPs. This one was already quite famous in a modest way, and brought back an insider’s tales of drunkenness, even violence, in the House of Commons bar, of the minor absurdities of parliamentary ritual, of vicious Cabinet gossip. And when at last, after three years’ toil in television studios and dining rooms, Darke became a junior minister, Stephen was truly elated. To have an old friend in high office transformed government into an almost human process and made Stephen feel rather worldly. Now a limousine – albeit a rather small and dented one – called at Eaton Square each morning to take the Minister to work, and a certain weary authoritativeness had crept into his manner. Stephen sometimes wondered whether his friend had finally succumbed to the opinions he had effortlessly assumed.